No news is some news

2011-05-10T07:55:00+01:00

There is currently a lot of consternation around Twitter users attempting to circumnavigate the latest batch of so called super-injunctions. The approach being taken by twitter users seems to involve throwing up a number of informed guesses as to the subjects of these injunctions and seeing what gets taken down. An interesting side-effect of the current injunctions being that someone might end up being found in contempt of court without actually knowing the facts that have been protected. It would be interesting if ignorance was actually held up to be a valid defence in this case.

The newspapers of course are free to egg things along by reporting on the reporting that they are unable to report on directly themselves.

However legal issues aside there is another problem with attempting to eradicate the collective memory of the internet. While things are extensively archived and uniquely indexed it become comparatively simple to look for the holes in the record. For example look at the Wikipedia Revision history for a random premier league footballer and you'll notice a number of edits that have been revision deleted rather than the usual straight reversion of wiki vandalism. This in of itself doesn't prove anything but it would certainly be an interesting exercise correlating the revision deletion patterns with reference to other entries including those that couldn't afford to be protected by injunctions.

I should point out I don't really care about stories of celebrities shagging around. Unless their behaviour is at odds with their public pronouncements on how the rest of us should lead our lives it's between themselves and their families. However there have been other cases of super-injunctions being used to prevent reporting on more serious matters where there was definitely a public interest in making more widely known.

Google's change of heart

2010-01-13T08:34:00+00:00

So Google are finally having second thoughts about their relationship with China. We may see then end of google.cn as a search engine that filters search results that might embarrass the authorities.

Google got a lot of stick at the time when they first created their Chinese presence. In reality they were doing what every other western Internet company had to do to get access to the massive growing market that is China. I suspect the reason they got more stick than most is because it was one of the early tests of their (in)famous "Don't be Evil" motto, a statement of purity that is never going to be easy to live up to while operating a profitable business.

Now that Google seem to be resigned to not being able to operate inside Chinese law I wonder if they would be willing to go the next step. There may be many arguments for censorship but secret censorship is very hard to defend. If you don't know what you aren't allowed to see how can you be sure of the motives of the powers that be that create that list. What I would love Google to do is share that list of censored results so we know exactly what it is the Chinese authorities don't like. For bonus points Google could rank the list in order of search popularity so we know what is the most requested censored pages are.

I suspect this won't happen as Google, despite their new approach, will want to maintain as cordial relationship with the government of the largest growing market in the world. While google.com does periodically drop off the radar in China every now and again (as it does not filter results) the temptation must surely be to ensure it has at least some visibility rather than none at all.

EDIT TO ADD: More information about hacks used and speculation about why. I'm just glad I don't use Adobe Reader...

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - censorship

No news is some news

Google's change of heart